Tag: school

What Artur Samarin pulled off at a school in small-town Pennsylvania is one of the boldest hoaxes of our time. He’d come a great distance-5,000 miles from Nova Kakhovka to Harrisburg. Artur gradually opened up and expressed his disillusionment with the realities of the exchange program-that much as he’d hoped it might serve as a springboard to college, it really was just a temporary tease of an American life. Of course he knew how he’d come to live the life he’d lived these past four years in Harrisburg, the masquerade he’d co-engineered, the pretenses under which he’d pulled it off and worked his way ever closer to the simple burning dream of admission to an American university. He didn’t yet understand the extent to which he’d faltered, or the fact that the Pottses were accusing him of much more than just enrolling at the high school. More significantly authorities began looking into a relationship he’d had with a fellow student at the high school, a relationship that would’ve been appropriate if he was who he said he was but was wholly inappropriate-and severely illegal-given his true age, exactly five years older than he’d purported to be in school. The ten-hour flight home might have been a final sloughing off of the skin of that person he’d pretended to be for four years. No matter how hard he tried to demonstrate enthusiasm, they were ghostly flavors in his mouth compared with what he’d tasted in the United States, the feast he’d been served on his “Silver plate.”

These muddy explorers stand out at a moment when many American pre-K programs have become more and more similar to K-12 education: row after row of tiny kids, sitting at desks, drilling letter identification and counting. Nature preschools, outdoor pre-K, forest kindergartens-call them what you like: Early-education programs like these are starting in communities all over the country. According to these advocates, a kid who suffers from anxiety doesn’t necessarily need medication, a child who can’t pay attention doesn’t need a computer program to reshape her development, and one who struggles to keep up physically doesn’t need a targeted summer-camp experience to build his muscles. The hard part is to nail down how much time outside are particularly good for kids-which is to say, what should outdoor education actually look like in practice? Are there particular types of outdoor experiences that kids really need? It’s not clear that anyone knows. Her small, private program serves mostly “Somewhat more affluent families.” In West Virginia, where the average monthly cost of center-based child care runs around $560, Riverside’s monthly $400 price tag is relatively steep, since that price only gets kids four days of care per week, and just three and a half hours each day. Well-heeled parents realize, she says, that “This is what’s going to give your kid an academic advantage. This is what’s going to give your kid life success.” She hopes that if “Affluent folks [are] demanding it,” more early education programs will emerge to provide more kids-of all backgrounds-more time outside. How can-how should-early-education programs balance the competing demands of academic development and outdoor play? Most kids could benefit from more time outside, but it’s hard to imagine that they don’t also need time with interesting, vocabulary-rich books. Compared to private programs like Irvine’s Nature Preschool and Riverside, Mundo Verde is expanding who can access outdoor early education.

The good news is that all these universities now offer free online courses across multiple online course platforms. Introduction to MarketingUniversity of Pennsylvania. Introduction to Operations ManagementWharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Introduction to Corporate FinanceWharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Introducción al MarketingUniversity of Pennsylvania. Introducción a las Finanzas CorporativasUniversity of Pennsylvania. Introducción a la Contabilidad FinancieraUniversity of Pennsylvania. Introduction to Spreadsheets and ModelsUniversity of Pennsylvania.

Having taught in business schools for 20 years, I have come to believe that the best solution to these problems is to shut down business schools altogether. In 2011, the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business estimated that there were then nearly 13,000 business schools in the world. Think about the huge numbers of people employed by those institutions, about the armies of graduates marching out with business degrees, about the gigantic sums of money circulating in the name of business education. A similar kind of lens could be applied to other modules found in most business schools – accounting, marketing, international business, innovation, logistics – but I’ll conclude with business ethics and corporate social responsibility – pretty much the only areas within the business school that have developed a sustained critique of the consequences of management education and practice. These are domains that pride themselves on being gadflies to the business school, insisting that its dominant forms of education, teaching and research require reform. The problem is that business ethics and corporate social responsibility are subjects used as window dressing in the marketing of the business school, and as a fig leaf to cover the conscience of B-school deans – as if talking about ethics and responsibility were the same as doing something about it. As Joel M Podolny, the former dean of Yale School of Management, once opined: “The way business schools today compete leads students to ask, ‘What can I do to make the most money?’ and the manner in which faculty members teach allows students to regard the moral consequences of their actions as mere afterthoughts.” So if we are going to move away from business as usual, then we also need to radically reimagine the business school as usual.

Like most other American high school students, Garret Morgan had it drummed into him constantly: Go to college. As for his friends from high school, “They’re still in college,” he said with a wry grin. High school graduates have been so effectively encouraged to get a bachelor’s that high-paid jobs requiring shorter and less expensive training are going unfilled. Nationwide, three out of 10 high school grads who go to four-year public universities haven’t earned degrees within six years, according to the National Student Clearinghouse. “The challenge is that in many cases it’s become the fallback. People are going to college without a plan, without a career in mind, because the mindset in high school is just, ‘Go to college.'”. The proportion of high school students who earned three or more credits in occupational education – typically an indication that they’re interested in careers in the skilled trades – has fallen from 1 in 4 in 1990 to 1 in 5 now, according to the U.S. Department of Education. These perceptions fuel the worry that, if students are urged as early as the seventh grade to consider the trades, then low-income, first-generation and ethnic and racial minority high school students will be channeled into blue-collar jobs while wealthier and white classmates are pushed by their parents to get bachelor’s degrees. Jessica Bruce followed that path, enrolling in college after high school for one main reason: because she was recruited to play fast-pitch softball.

As a recent Oxford University report confirmed, despite China’s many technological advances, in this new cyberspace race, the West had the lead.Xi knew he had to act. In 2013 the city’s teenagers gained global renown when they topped the charts in the PISA tests administered every three years by the OECD to see which country’s kids are the smartest in the world. In his book Why Don’t Kids Like School? cognitive Dan Willingham explains that complex mental skills like creativity and critical thinking depend on our first having mastered the simple stuff. “We don’t have any resources,” former education minister Ju-Ho Lee told me, “Just our minds and hard work.” He wasn’t kidding about the hard work. A decade ago, we consoled ourselves that although kids in China and Korea worked harder and did better on tests than ours, it didn’t matter. Troublingly, where education in the UK and US has been defined by creativity and independent thinking – Shanghai teachers told me of visits to our schools to learn about these qualities – our direction of travel is now away from those strengths and towards exams and standardisation, with school-readiness tests in the pipeline and UK schools minister Nick Gibb suggesting kids can beat exam stress by sitting more of them. Centres of excellence remain, but increasingly, it feels, we’re putting our children at risk of losing out to the robots, while China is building on its strong foundations to ask how its young people can be high-tech pioneers. In the AI long game, China may have the lead.Alex Beard is a former teacher and author of Natural Born Learners, published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson.

Then I walked to Boston Common to take the bus to the start in Hopkinton in slanted rain. Any hopes of pre-race comfort in the tents behind the school disappeared when we arrived at the start village behind Hopkinton High School, which had turned into a mud bowl. Smart runners brought a second pair of shoes to change into on the start line. I couldn’t feel my toes as the rain shifted between steady downpour and Noah’s Ark-style soaking. There were moments when the rain slowed, though it never stopped, and the wind quieted, and you thought, O.K., no big deal. So why not quit? Because long-distance runners live for the story. We love you thinking we are just crazy enough to run 26.2 miles in driving rain and freezing temperatures. Eventually, the six most beautiful words in distance running happened.

On Tuesday, a panel of experts in Washington, D.C., convened by the federally appointed officials who oversee the NAEP concluded that the root of the problem is the way schools teach reading. The statute required states to administer annual reading and math tests to students in grades three through eight and once in high school, and attached hefty consequences if schools failed to boost scores. Since 2001, the curriculum in many elementary schools has narrowed to little more than a steady diet of reading and math. Rarely do the topics connect: Students might read a book about bridges one day, zebras the next, and clouds the day after that. A sixth-grader at one of his schools was frustrated that a passage on a reading test she’d taken kept repeating a word she didn’t understand: roog-bye. The best way to boost students’ reading comprehension is to expand their knowledge and vocabulary by teaching them history, science, literature, and the arts, using curricula that that guide kids through a logical sequence from one year to the next: for example, Native Americans and Columbus in kindergarten; the colonial era and the American Revolution in first grade; the War of 1812 and the Civil War in second grade, and so on. What struggling students need is guidance from a teacher in how to make sense of texts designed for kids at their respective grade levels-the kinds of texts those kids may otherwise see only on standardized tests, when they have to grapple with them on their own. Poorer kids with less-educated parents tend to rely on school to acquire the kind of knowledge that is needed to succeed academically-and because their schools often focus exclusively on reading and math, in an effort to raise low test scores, they’re less likely to acquire it there.

“Especially compared to when I was in school.” Keith Kelly, superintendent of the Mayfield City School District, said the center was “About getting kids involved in inquiry, in solving problems, in partnerships, in authentic projects that may be of interest to them.” Career Academies in PasadenaThe Pasadena, Calif., Unified School District – a district in which 65 percent of the students qualify for free and reduced-price lunches – has nine career-themed “Academies” for its high school students. Engineering Innovation at ToyotaToyota has a number of initiatives aimed at funneling students into careers with the automaker, via partnerships with 256 high schools, summer internships for high school students, specialized degree tracks, and part-time employment at the college level and eventually, for those who finish the pathway, jobs. “As the number of students continues to diversify in terms of race, language and ethnicity, the teachers are still about 90 to 92 percent white,” said Claudia Rinaldi, the director of the education department at Lasell College in Newton, Mass.Lasell’s “Pathways to Teacher Diversity” – part of a statewide effort supported by a Gates Foundation grant – is a partnership with four school districts in the state intended to encourage more high school students of color to pursue careers in education. The long-term goal, she said, is to get these students to return, as certified teachers, to K-12 schools like the ones they attended. A Forerunner in New York CityIn 1972, City-as-School High School was established by New York City’s Board of Education, as a “School without walls.” According to a Bank Street College of Education paper on the alternative school’s history, prospective students were invited to “See the city as your curriculum” and to “Imagine yourself” in various and glamorous-sounding professional settings. There, the students are supervised by employees of the organization, and also by City-as-School teachers who help their students work through the new and daily challenges of work life.

A 2017 study that looked at tax records and college attendance data found that hundreds of two-year colleges are now magnets for well-off students, with many – like Williston State College in North Dakota, and Colorado Northwestern Community College in Rangely – having clocked notable increases. More recently, colleges like Northern Virginia Community College have reported their own increases. To lure students, some two-year colleges are starting to look a lot like their four-year peers, offering study abroad programs, modern dorms and renovated cafeterias. Valencia has recently become one of a growing number of community colleges to administer a bachelor’s degree, and Mr. Boiadjian has decided to stay on. Community colleges face significant graduation challenges, though. Nationally, just 6 percent of community college students get a bachelor’s degree within five years, according to data from 2004 through 2008 from the National Center for Education Statistics. Cost-Benefit AnalysisMiddle-class parents who send their children to community colleges say it can send a powerful message to them about personal finance. While many community colleges have clearly marked pathways to graduation and transfer agreements with highly prestigious four-year schools, not all do.